Last week was the kickoff a new project looking at diversity and productivity effects of nutrient and temperature alterations in high intertidal pools. This work is being done in collaboration with Matt Bracken’s Marine Biodiversity Lab group at UC Irvine. Pictured below are Dylan Projansky from SJSU, Matt Bracken (center), Genevieve Bernatchez (UCI), and Samuel Bedgood (UCI, bending over reading the YSI DO sensor).

Having just returned from the 100th Anniversary meeting of the Western Society of Naturalists meeting in Monterey, it seems like a fine time to generate some new summary data of trends in live-tweeting meetings. I originally addressed this some time last year in this original post: http://lukemiller.org/index.php/2016/01/is-live-tweeting-meetings-losing-steam-scicomm/. Since that time, there’s been new iterations of the WSN meeting and the Ecological Society of America meeting. I’ve scraped the Twitter archives for the relevant meeting hashtags (#wsn100 and #esa2016), and removed all retweets, so that only ‘original’ tweets are tallied here.
WSN 2016
Shown first below are the meeting totals for the … Continue Reading

It was the 100th anniversary of the formation of the Western Society of Naturalists this year. While WSN was originally a society with fairly broad interests in the terrestrial and marine realms, in the last few decades it has very much become focused on marine habitats, with the occasional estuarine or terrestrial presentations popping up. I try to make a point of going every year, since it’s a great way to catch up on marine science along the west coast of North America (and elsewhere on the globe), and it’s a very student-focused meeting, with at least half of the … Continue Reading

For several years, starting first at UC Santa Barbara around 1999/2000, and then in the mid 2000’s and early teens at Hopkins Marine Station, I would spend one or two low tides per year going out to the seashore and gluing fake plastic mussels into the middle of real mussel beds (as shown above). These ‘robomussels’ were originally created by Brian Helmuth (now of Northeastern University), … Continue Reading

The New York Times online Science section published a short piece earlier this month by Joanna Klein about humming to periwinkles.

Joanna contacted me for some background on this story, which has a simple premise:
People who grew up in coastal New England know this trick: To coax a periwinkle snail out of its shell, hum to it.
This was news to me, but also sounded crazy enough that there might … Continue Reading

I recently dredged up an old poster on tide heights and tidal datums that several of us put together back in graduate school and presented at the Western Society of Naturalists meeting in either 2003 or 2004. This was a hot topic (for 5 or so people) at the time, since the national tidal datums for the United States had all just been updated.

Lottia limpets sitting on an experimental plate in the intertidal zone.

We recently had a new paper come out in Marine Ecology Progress Series, titled Quantifying the top-down effects of grazers on a rocky shore: selective grazing and the potential for competition (open access link at MEPS) (permanent doi link).

This project involved putting a series of round aluminum plates out in the high intertidal zone at Hopkins Marine Station in Pacific Grove, CA, and allowing natural microalgae … Continue Reading

I had the time lapse camera described in this post set out in the rocky intertidal zone in Monterey. Late one afternoon it caught these images of a ground squirrel venturing down into the mussel zone and picking small mussels (Mytilus californianus) off the rocks and eating them. If you replay the video a few times you’ll see a couple of the mussels on the edge of the bed disappear as the squirrel pulls them off and opens them to eat the insides.

As I write this in early 2016, sitting in the armpit of Silicon Valley (San Jose is, undeniably based on geography, the armpit of the south San Francisco Bay), we are beginning to witness the first signs of a contraction of the exuberant venture capital markets that have fueled utterly silly tech startup company valuations for the past few years. Twitter is one of the earlier startup darlings that has managed to decline in terms of share price as user base growth slows.

Now I’m beginning to wonder if we’re seeing a similar stagnation in adoption of Twitter as a … Continue Reading

Course management software is universally garbage, but Canvas has managed to be better than most. Which is a lot like saying “This is the best tasting pile of dog poop I’ve found today.”

The ability to create online quizzes that have the answers entered for easy grading should make for a useful system, but today I discovered that the precision of the system tops out at the 4th decimal place, which tends to be problematic if I want students to calculate fairly small probabilities (what is the probability of flipping a coin 10 times and getting 10 heads in a row?). … Continue Reading